Met Police will reveal supplier for SIAM tower contract by next month

SIAM tower is "not condoned" by government, but Met Police has track record of ignoring advice

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is to award a contract to a supplier for its Service Integration and Management (SIAM) tower contract by early November.

As revealed in March this year, the Met Police sent several Digital Policing Newsletters to staff which said that it would outsource its software development capabilities, meaning that only 100 staff would be retained out of a current workforce of 800.

The department has an IT workforce of around 500 in-house staff and 300 contractors, and was evaluating the level of staffing that it will require in-house and the activities to be outsourced. The aim is to cut the organisation's IT costs as part of overall annual budget savings. The outsourcing programme said it was split into separate, functional "towers" and redundancies were expected.

A Metropolitan Police spokesperson has indeed confirmed that the organisation is likely to use the SIAM tower model, and that a supplier will be announced within the next month.

It may come as a surprise, however, that the organisation is using the SIAM tower model, after a blog by Alex Holmes, deputy director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which suggested that the approach was not in line with government policy, and was "not condoned". While many other public sector bodies, such as the Ministry of Justice and Transport for London, are in the middle of a SIAM approach, and therefore would find it near impossible to change their strategies now, the Met Police could have taken a different approach.

Computing did question the government's suggestion that the tower model was "no longer condoned", as it had been working for the Tri-Borough council, and so perhaps it is the right fit for some organisations. But it isn't the first time that the Met Police has decided to go against what is expected by government, and the IT sector in general; it is outsourcing its HR, payroll and finance functions to Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL) in a 10-year deal. This goes against what many in government have been advocating in recent years, namely short, flexible contracts that avoid vendor lock-in.

Last month, the decision to go outsource the functions to SSCL was criticised by a London Assembly Budget and Performance Committee report, which claimed that the Met and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) had not followed a "systematic approach".

"Given that the purpose of a commercial strategy is to help guide the Met to secure better deals from contractors in the future, we would have expected the new strategy to be finalised before the Met started to implement it," it said.

In this case the Met is outsourcing software development capabilities when many organisations are looking to bring software development in-house, and the committee's report suggested that there were alternative options to outsourcing.

"Options include setting up joint ventures with another organisation to provide a service or sharing services with other police forces, public bodies or within the GLA group - something the assembley has criticised the Met and other functional bodies for not exploring properly in the past," the report reads.

The latest issues with the SSCL contract and the SIAM tower approach follow a long line of IT issues at the Met Police. Back in 2013, the organisation was criticised for the exceptionally poor quality of its IT. A 2013 London Assembly report claimed that 90 per cent of the organisation's IT platforms would be redundant by 2016 due to age and obsolescence. It currently runs more than 400 separate IT systems, with some of them dating back to the 1970s.